Apple Eaters

This work is a single-channel version of the 1971 five-monitor piece Apple Eaters, which was shown at The Kitchen (then known as the Mercer Arts Center) in 1972. Tardos asked artists and other friends to "pose" for her while eating an apple. (In a later project, she invited other artists to eat their breakfast in front of her camera.) The act of eating of an apple gave Tardos a specific timeframe within which to complete each portrait. She herself participates in this project prominently, as she is composing the image while she records it. The result is a portrait of Tardos and her environment in the downtown New York art scene of the early 1970s. Among the "apple eaters" seen here are artists Charles Atlas, Gianfranco Mantegna, and Juan Downey.

Visual artist, poet and composer Anne Tardos produced multi-channel video works in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the early 1980s, she has been writing multilingual poetry in French, Hungarian, German, and English. These texts are combined with images, which often include captured stills from her videotapes and photographs. Since the early 1980s, she has worked on and performed many works with her husband and frequent collaborator, Jackson Mac Low.

Tardos has lectured and performed her works widely in the United States and Europe. She is the author of the multilingual performance work Among Men, 1992-94, produced by (WDR) West German Radio, Cologne. Her books of multilingual poems and graphics include The Dik-dik's Solitude: New & Selected Works, 2003; A Noisy Nightingale Understands the Tiger's Camouflage Totally, 2003; Uxudo, 1999; and Cat Licked the Garlic, 1992. Her works have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the 1990 Venice Biennale (Fluxus Pavillion); Museo d'Arte Moderna, Bolzano, and the New Museum, New York. Her recordings include the CDs A Chance Operation: The John Cage Tribute, 1992, collaboratively composed with Jackson Mac Low and Open Secrets, 1993. Tardos was born in France and grew up in Hungary, France, and Austria. She has lived and worked in New York since 1966.